The Yorkshire-headquartered supermarket chain Morrisons has found itself on the wrong side of the advertising rules this this morning for a wine promotion that drinkers couldn’t find in their local stores.
A press ad and a website promotion of the which offered some big name wines at ‘3 for £10. £5 each’ prompted two people to set off to their local store – only to find the wines weren’t available.
They complained to the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA).
Morrisons said that, based on their experience of similar offers, they estimated they would sell around 530 000 bottles of wine in the promotional period but in fact they started to run low on stocks on the first day.
By the end of the offer they had sold over 1,000,000 bottles of the wines included in the promotion.
The ASA which today ruled that the Bradford supermarket giant was in breach of the rules and that it must look at ways to make good on such offers in the future.
“We considered consumers would generally expect promotional prices to apply for a reasonable period after national press ads appeared, in the context of a fast-moving sector in which prices could fluctuate frequently and might apply on a short-term basis only, but that they were not likely to expect them to be permanent or long term.”
